Related papers: Mapping Post-Training Forgetting in Language Model…
Large language model (LLM) post-training enhances latent skills, unlocks value alignment, improves performance, and enables domain adaptation. Unfortunately, post-training is known to induce forgetting, especially in the ubiquitous use-case…
Catastrophic forgetting remains a formidable obstacle to building an omniscient model in large language models (LLMs). Despite the pioneering research on task-level forgetting in LLM fine-tuning, there is scant focus on forgetting during…
Large language models (LLMs) suffer from forgetting of upstream knowledge when fine-tuned. Despite efforts on mitigating forgetting, few have investigated how forgotten upstream examples are dependent on newly learned tasks. Insights on…
When language models (LMs) are trained to forget (or "unlearn'') a skill, how precisely does their behavior change? We study the behavior of transformer LMs in which tasks have been forgotten via fine-tuning on randomized labels. Such LMs…
Adapting language models (LMs) to new tasks via post-training carries the risk of degrading existing capabilities -- a phenomenon classically known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, toward identifying guidelines for mitigating this…
We study and quantify the problem of forgetting when fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on a downstream task. We find that parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategies, such as Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA), still suffer…
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) plays a critical role for pretrained large language models (LLMs), notably enhancing their capacity to acquire domain-specific knowledge while preserving or potentially augmenting their general-purpose…
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable proficiency across various tasks. Given the potent applications of LLMs in numerous fields, there has been a surge in LLM development. In developing LLMs, a common…
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common first stage of LLM post-training, teaching the model to follow instructions and shaping its behavior as a helpful assistant. At the same time, SFT may harm the fundamental capabilities of an LLM,…
Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training often improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) beyond the training domain, while supervised fine-tuning (SFT) frequently leads to general capabilities forgetting.…
Large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned for use on downstream tasks, though this can degrade capabilities learned during previous training. This phenomenon, often referred to as catastrophic forgetting, has important potential…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on massive datasets and later instruction-tuned via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL). Best practices emphasize large, diverse pretraining data, whereas post-training…
A widespread strategy to obtain a language model that performs well on a target domain is to finetune a pretrained model to perform unsupervised next-token prediction on data from that target domain. Finetuning presents two challenges: (i)…
Post-training algorithms such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) are widely used to adapt (multimodal) large language models to downstream tasks. While effective at task adaptation, their impact on retaining…
Catastrophic forgetting is a significant challenge in continual learning, in which a model loses prior knowledge when it is fine-tuned on new tasks. This problem is particularly critical for large language models (LLMs) undergoing continual…
Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) require post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on instruction-response pairs to enable instruction following. However, this process can potentially harm existing capabilities…
The Superficial Alignment Hypothesis posits that almost all of a language model's abilities and knowledge are learned during pre-training, while post-training is about giving a model the right style and format. We re-examine these claims by…
Language models retain a significant amount of world knowledge from their pre-training stage. This allows knowledgeable models to be applied to knowledge-intensive tasks prevalent in information retrieval, such as ranking or question…
Continual learning (CL) in large language models (LLMs) is an evolving domain that focuses on developing efficient and sustainable training strategies to adapt models to emerging knowledge and achieve robustness in dynamic environments. Our…
Continual post-training of generative models is widely used, yet a principled understanding of when and why forgetting occurs remains limited. We develop theoretical results under a two-mode mixture abstraction (representing old and new…